Start Here
This is a digital garden — a collection of notes at various stages of development. Some are seeds: rough ideas, fragments, things I’m still thinking through. Others have grown into something more complete. The connections between them matter as much as the notes themselves.
The garden covers systems thinking, craft, physical practice, language, design, and the ways knowledge moves between domains. It’s organized by how I engage with ideas: making, training, perceiving, understanding, connecting, stewarding.
The Ground
A handful of notes form the foundation. Start with any of these.
Systems is the pattern language of complexity. Feedback loops, emergence, unintended consequences. Most problems that matter involve multiple interacting parts where the whole behaves differently than you’d expect from the pieces.
Tacit knowledge is what can’t be written down. The master potter knows when the clay is right through touch — no measurement can replace it. This kind of knowledge transfers through proximity and practice — apprenticeship — and resists instruction manuals.
Craft treats making as a way of knowing. The hand teaches the mind. Skills develop through repetition with attention, what psychologists call deliberate practice. Tools matter; so does sharpening them.
Emergence names how wholes have properties their parts don’t. Wetness isn’t in the hydrogen or the oxygen. Consciousness isn’t in the neurons. The interesting questions live at the interfaces.
Useful fictions are models that work even when they’re wrong. “Treat focus like a battery” is physiologically false but produces useful behavior. The mechanism doesn’t matter; the behavior does.
Slack is unused capacity. The schedule with no margin has no room for the unexpected. Systems that run at 100% are fragile. What looks like waste is often resilience.
Ways In
Different readers want different things. Here are some entry points.
If you think in systems, start with antifragility — things that gain from disorder. Then feedback loops, selection, and Gall’s law. Watch for cobra effect and Goodhart’s law — the ways interventions backfire.
If you make things, explore tools and the philosophy of maintenance. The jig is a meta-tool that democratizes precision. Workmanship of risk distinguishes craft from manufacture. Notice how patina reveals quality over time.
If you train, the martial arts notes map physical practice: grappling and its principles like positional hierarchy and chain wrestling. The tennis notes (inner game, implicit learning, external focus) explore the psychology of performance. Both connect to flow — optimal experience.
If you design, start with affordances — what objects tell us about how to use them. Pattern language offers Christopher Alexander’s approach. The Japanese aesthetics notes (wabi-sabi, ma, negative space) present an alternative to Western design assumptions.
If epistemology interests you, useful fictions and map and territory question how models relate to reality. Tacit knowledge asks what can be made explicit. Falsification examines how we test beliefs.
What Connects Everything
Three ideas appear across domains:
Selection is universal. Evolution (biology), markets (economics), tradition (culture), learning (brains), technology (artifacts) — all involve the same pattern: vary, test, keep what works. Selection ties it together.
Constraints enable creativity. Affordances and constraints in design, the five-paragraph essay, the sonnet form, the 12-bar blues. Limitation forces novel recombinations. See bricolage — making do with what’s at hand.
Knowledge is embodied. Tacit knowledge threads through craft, navigation, grappling. The sushi master’s knife skills, the navigator’s sense of the swell, the grappler’s feel for leverage. Mind isn’t separate from body.
How to Navigate
This is a garden, not a book. There’s no right order. Follow the links that interest you. Return to notes you’ve seen before — they’ll read differently after you’ve explored their neighbors.
Some notes are seeds: incomplete, maybe wrong, planted to see what grows. Some are sprouts: developing but not yet stable. A few are grown: mature enough to share confidently.
The connections between notes are as valuable as the notes themselves. Each link is an invitation to follow.
Related: [[scenius]], [[adjacent-possible]], [[innovation]]